The Iron Hand: New Zealand Soldiers' Poems from World War II by Les Cleveland (ed.)

$30.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

Peat by Lynn Jenner

$20.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

"Peat starts out as Lynn Jenner's study of the Kāpiti Expressway, built between 2013 and 2017 and passing, at its nearest point, about a kilometre from her own house. She decides to create a kind of archive of the construction of this so-called Road of National Significance. How did it come to be built ? What is its character? Who will win and who will lose from its construction? What will be its impact on the local environment? Jenner begins a quest to find a fellow writer with different sensibilities to help her think about the natural world the road traverses. New Zealand-born poet, editor, art collector and philanthropist Charles Brasch is her choice. Researching Brasch will be her refuge from the constant pile-driving and the sprawling concrete, and perhaps the poet will offer some ways of thinking that will help her understand contemporary events. She reads and reflects on Braschs memoir, some of his poems, his journals and his letters to the local paper. She thinks about Brasch in the context of his family and New Zealand in the 1940s60s, and she reads local papers. She reads the official handouts about the road and listens to people in her local community when they talk about the road. From there Lynn Jenner carefully builds her unconventional text, layer upon layer, into an intelligent and beautifully refracted work that is haunting, fearless, and utterly compelling." ...Show more

The Pop-up Book of Invasions by Fiona Farrell

$15.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

A collection of poems which draw on the landscape, history and mythology of Ireland, sharing a sense of discovery. This title also makes connections with home, New Zealand, childhood.

Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean by Sugar Magnolia Wilson

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

Through fun and gore, love and monsters, Sugar Magnolia Wilson¿s riveting first collection takes readers inside a world where past and present, fiction and fact, author and subject collide. Playful and yet not so sunny, these poems invite you in with extravagant and surprising imagery, only to re veal the uneasy, Frankenstein world within. ...Show more

The Girls on the Wall by Diana Bridge

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

Lay Studies by Steven Toussaint

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

In Lay Studies, Steven Toussaint conducts an impressive range of lyric inventions, pitching his poems to that precarious interval between love and rage. Beneath their formal dexterity and variety, these études sustain a continuous meditation on the concords and dissonances of worsh ipful life in an age dominated by spectacle, violence, and environmental devastation. With great skill and compassion, he depicts scenes of domestic life in his adopted home of New Zealand, a transient year of religious and artistic soul-searching in the United Kingdom, and a growing sense of dislocation from his native United States in the Trump era. These are poems of profound contemplative inwardness, conjuring and conversing with a vast tradition of literature, scholarship, and art. Lay Studies is a powerful collection and a welcome music. Cover: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, 'Bird', 1913–14 (circa). © Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge  These are elegant poems. They have verve, they have wit and no little learning. They reveal a mind like a knife. An ear of the same quality. All of which = what's needed in a calamitous time that calls itself the Information Age. —John Taggart Steven Toussaint writes with a formidable blend of intellectual toughness and technical command. These finely worked poems range over a wide territory, local and global, religious, social (a devastatingly intelligent piece, 'Yes or No', evoking the world of online pseudo-discourse), and offer many memorable images and phrases (a favourite is 'The furious pleasure / of a man being listened to'). This is an excellent collection of demanding and rewarding poetry.—Rowan Williams   ...Show more

Straw into Gold: Poems New and Selected by C. K. Stead

$14.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Series: International Poets Ser. | Reading Level: very good

Just Another Fantastic Anthology: Auckland in Poetry by Stu Bagby (ed.)

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

Dop 2008, Auckland softcover Editor Stu Bagby has attempted to cover the geological, cultural and historical aspects of the city while keeping a focus on the people;Auckland sprawls between 2 magnificent and quite different coastlines, the biggest Polynesian city in the world. This collection hopefully gives some insight into what it was and is like to live in New Zealand's biggest city, and that the poems engage readers whether they are Aucklanders or not.Includes poems by Sam Hunt, C.K Stead, Glenn Colquhoun, Sue Wootton, Hone Tuwhare and many, many others. ...Show more

Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty by Ian Wedde

$12.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

Five extended poems linked by themes of beauty and language make up this lively new collection from one of the best New Zealand poets writing today. The long poem gives Wedde room to explore these themes in detail, weaving back and forth, accumulating phrases, images and sounds, always with characterist ic exuberance and humour. The central 'Hymn to Beauty' is a calendar of a search for beauty among the everyday, made up of song lyrics, favourite people, quoatations and conversations. In 'Letter to Peter McLeavey' the poet travels the country, delighting afresh in its beauty but also seeing it through the eyes of painters who have preceded him as interpreters of the landscape. The 'Three Regrets' that open the collection and the concluding poem for his mother provide vivid and moving frames for this wonderful book. First published 2005. “It’s hard to review this collection without recourse to the tag ‘beautiful’. It’s warm, open and erudite, full of good grace and humour. Wedde’s leaps of language and thought are as surefooted but never presumptuous; the reader is allowed both the pleasures of the sensory world, and of a substantial intellectual engagement with it.” - Takahe ...Show more

C. K. Stead: Collected Poems 1951-2006 by C. K. Stead

$25.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: very good

As well as being one of New Zealand's most celebrated living writers, C.K. Stead has earned an international audience for his poetry and fiction.

An Anthology of New Zealand Verse by Robert Chapman and Jonathan Bennett (eds)

$10.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: good

Knucklebones: Poems 1962 - 2012 by Sam Hunt

$20.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Poetry | Reading Level: near fine

Sam Hunt is New Zealand's best-known and, arguably, best-loved poet. Since the publication of Doubtless: New and Selected Poems in 1998 (which has sold over 5000 copies), his career has been having a significant renaissance. He continues to regularly perform, has published a memoir, Backroads, a new col lection of poems, Chords, had afeature documentary, 'Purple Balloon', go to general cinematic release, and collaborated with Dick Frizzell on a series of poem paintings. Knucklebones: Poems 1962-2012 is the latest collection of Sam Hunt poems to be published. It is intended to replace Doubtless (now out of print) to ensure that a substantial collection of his poems remain available to the general reader. Organised chronologically with a selection of poems from each of his published books, Knucklebones presents an outstanding collection of Sam Hunt's work, that runs from the earliest poems that first made his name, through to poems written 50 years on in 2012. Sam Hunt has had a remarkable and enduring career, and Knucklebones is a fitting tribute to the quality of his remarkable poems. ...Show more